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WAR ON TERROR: THE OTHER VICTIMS: The irresponsibility of this conflict is breathtaking. It is not about terrorism. As Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York, British forces are little more than mercenaries for the hidden agenda of U.S. imperial ambitions

By John Pilger Former Mirror Chief Foreign Correspondent

THE war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.

Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.

And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.

If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.

None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States. The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

WITH secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.

So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.

The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years". The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose.

In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.

By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.

If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government. Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.

If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger. He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.

HE would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.

That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center.

There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? ?800million so far.

According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby.

"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.

THE tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries.

There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.

There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.

The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us.

Billions of dollars are being spent and the attention of the world focused on a potentially unwinnable war against terrorism and though unpalatable and inconvenient, the fact that the worlds greatest military superpower is quite unable to defeat Afghanistan in less than the months or even years suggested by an increasing number of Official spokesmen is nothing short of scandalous. Just what has the American taxpayers money been spent on?

The vast international intelligence network of the CIA, NSA and its allies, the Echelon system, a military that can operate stealth bombers, cruise missiles, giant nuclear aircraft carriers, smart bombs and a vast and unbelievably expensive armoury of exotic weapons including 'Star wars technology', but which cannot quickly defeat 40,000 Taliban warriors armed with nothing much more advanced than a machine gun, a Toyota pick-up and a few Stingers which the CIA gave them more than ten years ago. What price America's allies? Most are in the coalition because they can extract concessions from the Whitehouse or they simply want to maintain the flow of aid. Even the special relationship with Britain has so far only run to diplomatic and intelligence support, a few hundred Marines,the SAS and half a dozen elderly warships.

The vast military expenditure of the developed nations has produced armed forces wedded to highly advanced 'boys toys' and has failed to provide sufficient capable, quickly deployable, muti-purpose and adaptable forces to take on the type of enemy likely to be faced in the 21st century; the low-key, low technology warrior, ethnic conflicts and terrorism. The power of the military-industrial complex, a lack of political understanding and a fear of body-bags has denied our armed forces the capability to quickly and effectively deal with the problems they now face.

A genuine world-wide threat.

While this pantomime of the elephant and the flea continues, the real crisis that threatens the world is ignored.

Global warming, like it or not, will eventually affect every human being on earth. Sooner, rather than later too. Put the terrorist and Anthrax into perspective, the change in climate will allow the spread of West Nile Fever and the mosquito bringing the threat of malaria to Britain and much of Europe. Wars over diminishing natural resources, particularly water will come to dominate this century in a way that Osama Bin-Laden can only dream of doing.

Areas like Ladakh may well run out of water within ten years, the unrest in Israel, Syria, Iraq, Turkey and many other countries is often driven by water requirements, while whole Pacific island groups are threatened with total evacuation and even the predicted rise in sea level will threaten the viability of Holland, East Anglia in Britain and London itself.

Nor will the United States escape the effects; more devastating storms, dust-bowls and the spread of deadly new diseases and pests are among a growing number of threats to America.

The eco-crisis is not in the future, the early stages are with us right now and everyone is at some risk. The vast resources so quickly made available for warfare and a conflict that we are now told may last a lifetime, were apparently not available to at least try and deal with a world wide crisis that definitely will not go away and will indeed, get worse year by year until Governments will have no alternative but to face up to a natural calamity. Too late by then, of course.

It cannot be denied that terrorism must be countered, but perhaps by using our intelligence, ensuring social justice and taking every possible economic measure to undermine support for their perverted religious or political ideals.

Afghanistan and Osama Bin-laden are major distractions from a much more serious problem that threatens the very existence of our world and in a way that even a thousand terrorist outrages simply cannot.

Osama bin Laden, as best anyone can tell, wants Muslims to unite in a grand alliance, with him at its helm. The concept is not new. The British confronted the Mahdi in the Sudan in the 1890s, and this fanatic rebel, too, fancied himself a millenarian leader, bound to unify all believers under a banner of conquest and vanquish the infidel. The Mahdi in the Sudan failed, because, confronting the premier military and economic power of the day, his own forces were puny, and he lacked the means to recruit followers even to communicate his message beyond his immediate environs. Osama bin Laden in key respects is a far more dangerous and cunning opponent than this and other forebears. However, in an extraordinary irony, he and his cause could meet with an even more resounding defeat. Whether or not he forges a Pan-Islamic movement united against the West, bin Laden is near to triggering the establishment of an alliance far more fearsome than any conceivable alignment of Muslim countries. America, Russia, and China - a weight that indeed no other geopolitical combination whatsoever could withstand - may well and indeed should, on bin Laden's provocation, themselves join together in an alliance no less grand than the one he hopes to create.

The plan bin Laden has formulated to achieve his world-spanning aims involves a simple progression: commit acts of unbridled terror against America, causing America to retaliate against one or more Muslim countries and thus provoking Muslims into a single enraged community eager to elevate bin Laden to the status of messiah he so craves. The Saudi dissident has gone about his work with some cleverness. Take his manipulation of the media and opinion in the Muslim world. First, he has avoided public credit for the attacks of September 11, and polls show that most Arabs, ignoring the outrageousness of the proposition, believe that the United States itself orchestrated the devastation in Washington and New York, in order to furnish pretext for an attack on Muslims. Second, the US response, well-measured by objective and historical standards, is believed by most Arabs and many Muslims beyond the Arab world to constitute a terrific and bloody assault on millions of innocent civilians. So effective has this part of the bin Laden gambit been, that one suspects that if the United States did no more than send a politely worded note to Kabul requesting an apology, Near Eastern opinion nonetheless would hold that neo-crusaders had unleashed against Muslims a form of apocalypse. Thus the Muslim world, fuelled by false premises and gross exaggeration, lurches toward unity.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Colin Powell focuses on knitting together a hodgepodge of disparate countries to work alongside the US in rooting out terrorists. Great emphasis is placed on bringing multiple Muslim countries into the "alliance", even as it becomes ever clearer that some of the Muslim countries at the heart of Powell's planning contain such radicalized polities that their participation is mere fiction. Turkey, exceptionally, stands firmly with Washington, and Pakistan, though a powder keg of Islamic discontent, may yet fulfil its pledge of support. Beyond these countries, however - and even between the two of them, Pakistan remains a question mark - the situation is grim. To build the "alliance" that the United States now so emphasizes, it has had to find common denominators for all the states it aim to incorporate into it. Combining a welter of Arab and other Muslim states with various Western countries, themselves of widely varying resolve, makes for a geopolitical structure so loosely defined and unstable as to have no meaning at all. Bin Laden may well be creating a Muslim alliance of broad scope, focused on his own fanatical goals, whilst the alliance Washington has aimed thus far to build must remain a mirage.

Secretary Powell's alliance, while perhaps placating European fence-sitters, has little chance of serving any purpose in the actual combat that must ensue. The interests of the constituents of that mirage of an alliance are simply too varied and, moreover, their perceptions of the threat are too divergent for them to agree to meaningful action in concert. But three countries do share fundamental interests and, more importantly, do share similar perceptions of the threat. The US's leaders should recognize that the United States, Russia, and China are the logical alliance in the war against Islamic terror.

Americans on September 11, on their own territory, witnessed the fury of radical Islam. But Russia has confronted this problem for some time, and the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has upbraided the United States for failing to understand the nature of the problem his government confronts in Chechnya and other Muslim regions of the former USSR. China's leaders have shown little tolerance for religious movements of any stripe when these hint at challenge to the state. And China, though much further from the headlines, has also struggled with Islamic radicals. Chinese officials, for fear of assassination, have long dreading service in the western, Uighur-inhabited reaches of the People's Republic. That Chechen and Chinese Muslims have joined bin Laden at his camps in Afghanistan tightens the link.

Countries, absent a clear threat, very seldom have bound themselves together in pursuit of peacetime objectives. We should be careful before assuming that the multiple rounds of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) talks represent anything like the norm. Defense against a common danger, by contrast, has proved a prime mover in the creation of geopolitical alignments. It happened against Frederick the Great, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler. Fear of communist encroachment kept the long-feuding states of Western Europe together even longer than in the past. To be sure, the risk of natural disasters, ranging from smallpox to ozone depletion, more recently has also produced broad-based cooperation, but these projects, though carried out in time of peace, are themselves essentially defensive.

The attacks of September 11 finally brought into focus that the world faces a new threat demanding concerted action. Not just isolated cells of suicidal holy warriors, but vast stretches of Muslim opinion have arrayed themselves in battle formation. Their goal is to destroy the international order as we know it, even though they can offer nothing to replace it. This enemy, then, follows in the footsteps of the very worst revisionists of the past. The response, just as in the past, must come, not from disparate minor players and the ranks of the revisionists themselves, but, rather, from the premier incumbent powers of our day. That is to say, the alliance against terror must center around the largest and most powerful members of the system that is now in peril.

America, Russia, and China, their differences notwithstanding, constitute the core of contemporary geopolitical incumbency. The position of America in this is clear enough, for our power and prosperity are unrivalled and radical revision of world order is never the vocation of the premier state in the international system. China has found a formula for political stability and economic growth at home and enhancement of diplomatic power abroad. The current trajectory, in most of its features, suits the People's Republic very well. It may appear that, of the three powers, Russia is the one least possessed of the attributes of incumbency. But to assume that Russia has less interest in preserving the current world order would ignore cardinal facts. Russia remains, in territorial extent, the largest state in the world. It possesses the first or second largest arsenal of thermonuclear weapons, along with the means to deliver them. Its resources are vast, and income from hydrocarbon exports is growing. Russia, like the United States and China, holds a permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of bin Laden's strategy. He has declared his intent to revise the world order in radical ways. This is bound, at the very least, to put the incumbent powers on guard to protect their position. But bin Laden has done much more than that. By carrying out mass destruction on the very soil of the premier power and forming a support network that aids violent and disruptive Muslim radicals everywhere, he also threatens the domestic security of the incumbent powers. In this, his challenge is unlike that in the past when disaffected groups have tried to revise the way the world functions. The Mahdi at Khartoum did nothing to threaten Britons on their own shores. America, China, and Russia, by contrast, today face far worse than a disadvantageous reshuffling of international rank. Defeat in the present contest would not simply entail lowering our flags at distant outposts. The means our enemy has chosen to effect his desired reshuffling of international order imperils our very domestic order as well. Toward America, China, and Russia, then, bin Laden has posed a threat of unparalleled unifying potential. It is a double threat: to unseat them as international powers and to deny them tranquillity even at home. His scheme of alliance-building is quite simply in the process of backfiring on a scale of epic proportion.

The present motions of international diplomacy as led from Washington, DC, give only veiled indication of the emergence of a tripartite super-pact. But the forces of mutual interest and mutual perception of threat work their own logic. If the Islamic revisionists were to carry out more attacks against civilians on our own territories, then progress toward unified action amongst the three great powers might well prove inexorable. It may well be that unified action is about to happen in any event.

President George W Bush, meeting in Shanghai with his Chinese counterpart, President Jiang Zemin, appears to have obtained a meaningful commitment from China to fight terrorism. Perhaps more tellingly, the leaders agreed that there is a need to protect global stability. This begins to sound like incumbent powers at last recognizing the fundamental similarity of their interests in the face of a revisionist threat. Just as striking are recent words from Russia suggesting a willingness to accommodate the United States on missile defense and even on NATO expansion. It could be that the go-ahead from Moscow some weeks ago to permit American forces to deploy in the former Soviet territory of Uzbekistan signalled that the Russia-United States leg of the triad was already in place. It also bears noting that shortly after the Shanghai discussions between Bush and Jiang, Pakistan, a state over which China exercises considerable influence, increased its commitment to the war on terrorism by announcing that "alliance forces" would be using a major base in the west of the country.

Bin Laden has miscalculated. He may or may not yet prove able to foment a Muslim uprising of great breadth, but, by inadvertence, he seems to have made a far more potent alliance nearly inevitable. Only a strategic blunder even greater than his own will prevent the United States, China, and Russia from joining now in common cause to protect the order and security of which they uniquely are guarantors.

Tom Grant is the Warburg Research Fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford University, United Kingdom.

--------------------Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
-- George Owell

Sometimes I think there should be a rule against posting editorial pieces, etc. Just say what you got to say yourself...

Anyway ... "polls show that most Arabs, ignoring the outrageousness of the proposition, believe that the United States itself orchestrated the devastation in Washington and New York,"..

So what? Most polls show African Americans believe OJ Simpson is innocent. Why not ask yourself why folks are so willing to believe these things. Wouldn't be because these folks are so used to getting screwed over by the offending parties, would it?

No, you choose to believe they are stupid and brain washed, whereas you are so intelligent and open minded... LMAO

I honestly have no problem with people posting editorial pieces they've copy-pasted from other sources...I actually enjoy it somewhat simply because it spares me the time it takes to find the sources of information I want. The previous three articles were all very good to various degrees. Though, perhaps a good policy would be to post a link in the format of: Editorial - > and then post a synopsis of your own feelings on the editorial itself so that people are not upset by having to wade through the huge blocks of text unnecessarily.

Good post there ElPrimo. A recent ABC news poll also shows that a higher percentage of African Americans are in favor of racial profiling in finding potential terrorists than are White Americans. I think that little gem speaks for itself...
As far as these folks here with their "cut and paste" intellectualism, we have a funeral pyre in Lower Manhattan with about 4000 bodies on it. It still smolders. Get your head out of your ass and wake the fuck up.

--------------------[red] Life:[/red][blue] Live it foward, understand it backward...[/blue]

What does black people supporting racial profiling have to do with anything? How does adding more deaths to a tragedy make things good, instead of trying to solve the problem? Whats wrong with posting editorial pieces written by people whos job it is to cover stuff like this? And, its obvious that polls are horribly inaccurate. Maybe it was just cause more white people answered the polls... are only the black people who supported racial profiling answered it.. etc. I wouldn't listen to anything thats on TV. I remember seeing a poll where they said more kids used drugs in the suburbs then in cities.

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.” -- Thomas Jefferson

The greatest sin of mankind is ignorance.

The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. --Salena Zeto (9/23/16)

Too often we simply look at extremes and opposites when looking for alternatives. If we see white and see that it is 'bad' we cringe and look immediately at black hoping that the opposite will be 'good'. Too often though we get a result where we begin simply juggling various degrees of 'bad' as we switch our gaze back and forth between the two polarities. Let us be precise - if the United States wants to maintain the stance that its policies towards foreign countries and peoples have nothing to do with what occured on September 11th, then yes, there are only two roads that we can concievably travel - War or Isolationism. The belief that the United States did nothing to precipitate the September 11th attack is an assumption, and when you're trying to figure out the solution to a problem, your assumptions dictate where you stand and how you look. If we alter our assumptions (or do away with them to whatever extent) then new possibilies emerge spontaneously, new solutions just pop up out of the darkness of inconcievability. Alter your assumptions and you alter your solutions.

I am not denying that our interventions in the past have gotten us to where we are, but when talking about the Middle East, you are in a region where no matter what you do, you are fucked.

Europe would not be happy if we left Saudi Arabia. 30 percent of their oil comes from the Middle East and it seems rather apparant that Houssaine wants to control that entire area. So what options does that leave us with?

--------------------"America: Fuck yeah!" -- Alexthegreat

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.” -- Thomas Jefferson

The greatest sin of mankind is ignorance.

The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally. --Salena Zeto (9/23/16)